I have to assume that anyone who might read my books is at least as easily bored as I am. In writing the linked fictions that make up This Is the Ritual, it was my intention to produce short stories that are intense and compelling all the way through, rather than only in parts. Basically, I wanted to write short stories for people – like me – who find a lot of short stories pretty boring. My way of going about this was to ignore, whenever I saw fit, the conventions that many stories adhere to, and find ways to write only about what fascinated me, to hell with all the rest. I gave full expression to my obsessions and hallucinations, my nightmares. If I didn’t feel like describing something, I didn’t bother; if I wanted reckless digressions over nuanced interpersonal relationships, or torrential maximalism over tasteful understatement, or to repeatedly insert myself as a character and slander the shit out of him, that’s what I did.
In seeking to write prose fiction which does not obligate its author, in Milan Kundera’s words, “to stray by even a single line from what he cares about, what fascinates him”, it is often a question of how much can be left out – plot, for instance, or laborious descriptions, or details of one kind or another. Why waste the reader’s time with filler? It sounds simple but it bears repeating: a fiction can be anything its author wants it to be. The greatest literary works are those in which the author’s individuality is unmistakably present on every page, in every sentence, and not obscured behind a screen of handed-down forms. Just as pretty much any long piece of imaginative prose has the right to call itself a novel, a short story does not have to look like something from Dubliners, or by Raymond Carver or Alice Munro – it can look more like an encyclopaedia entry, a book review, a confession, a travel article, a police report, a list, a review, or anything at all. The only obligation is that it be interesting.
Among the 13 fictions that This Is the Ritual comprises, there are stories in various forms: a profanity-ridden rant (John Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist); essays about sinister or enigmatic writers (Exiled in the Infinite – Killian Turner, Ireland’s Vanished Literary Outlaw); a montage of 62 hallucinatory snapshots of desperate people, erotic transgressions, and apocalyptic cityscapes (Outposts); an account of the author’s struggle to write a book about a great philosopher that never actually gets written (On Nietzsche); a disturbing email sent to the author from an Irish psychotic (or perhaps not) in San Francisco (Final Email from P Cranley); and one which has no characters or plot at all, only an eerie and entrancing porn film (Anus – Black Sun). There are also more straightforward narratives of anguish, sex and dissolution (The Turk Inside, Barcelona, Mexico Drift). In each case, the form was dictated by an instinctive consideration of what would deliver the greatest cargo of pleasure, intensity and fascination. That was the only rule.
It has been said that the two most depressing words in the English language are literary fiction, but a close pair of runners-up might be experimental fiction. The phrase sounds so dreary and joyless, so miserly! And yet it points to something that can be fresh and vital. All interesting writers are experimenters, whether or not they bother to label themselves as such. Indeed, great writers transcend the term: by hammering away at literary form until it suits their purposes perfectly, in their work they are simply and thoroughly themselves. Rather than experimentalism, I like to think in terms of playfulness, ingenuity, risk, wildness, artistic freedom – these are the qualities I admire in the writers I love, the writers who persuade me that it is a good idea to spend one’s life putting words on pages.
There are certain literary factions that pride themselves on unreadability, on difficulty for its own sake, but it is possible for daring, formally challenging, innovative fiction to become popular. In novels like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, which weave character-based narratives with playful authorial digressions and philosophical essays, the aforementioned Kundera not only (re)expanded our notion of what the novel is allowed to do, he did so in a way that made him virtually a household name. People actually bought his books, in great numbers! Another widespread misconception about so-called experimental writing is that it is coldly cerebral, cut off from the emotional depths that nourish great fiction. The stories in This Is the Ritual have just as much of the rage, pain, sadness, terror and longing that readers responded to in my first novel, Here Are the Young Men. There is no reason why fiction should be segregated according to binaries like emotional/intellectual or readable/innovative. Great writing soars above such distinctions, and moves and amazes simply by being absolutely itself. Ideally, we would do away with the notion of “experimental” art altogether, and speak only of originality.
From Lydia Davis’s suavely pared-down microfictions, to Geoff Dyer’s travel-critical-fictional hybrids, to JL Borges’s ripping up of the rulebook to create timelessly dazzling fictive treasures, the authors who stand out for me are those who are most playful, most willing to bend literary form into the beautiful new shapes they require of it, rather than let it impose itself on them, from the outside.
Not that I mean to suggest This Is the Ritual belongs in such exalted company, only that this spirit of playfulness, dazzlement and ingenuity I find in such writers has given me a guiding light, a standard to aim for, a way of going about business. To quote James Clarence Mangan’s delightful and curiously modern assemblage of prose fragments from 1839, A Sixty-Drop Dose of Laudanum, “I should far and away prefer being a great necromancer to being a great writer or even a great fighter. My natural propensities lead me rather to seek out modes of astonishing mankind than of edifying them.”
[ Irish Writers Centre in Dublin’s Parnell Square on Tuesday, April 19th, at 7.30pmOpens in new window ]
